Places The translation is available (February 9th, 2025)
“The violation of these [personal] data, through access to them, collection, processing, disclosure or publication, usually constitutes a total violation of the private sphere and dignity of the person. It is a loss of control over the person’s data, which is essentially equivalent to a total loss of his or her autonomy.” Christina Akrivopoulou
“Besides, what // do you think poetry is deep down? It is the pollen // of the things of the universe. The pollen in actions, // the pollen in pain, in light, in joy, in changes, // in progress, in movement.
Life and the psyche // in an eternal reflection in time.
So what do you think; deep down, poetry is a human heart burdened with all the world.” Nikiforos Vrettakos
Today’s post includes four new drawings of places in Greece and references to a book by Nikiforos Vrettakos, from POTAMOS Publications, as well as an article related to the constitutional right to the protection of personal data by Christina M. Akrivopoulou.
Α. The Naked Child (1939) by Nikiforos Vrettakos from POTAMOS Publications
Nikiforos Vrettakos was born in 1912 in Laconia. He spent his childhood and adolescence between Ploumitsa, Krokei and Gytheio. He went to Athens in 1929 to start university studies, which he didn;t complete due to financial difficulties and health problems in the family. He did various jobs to survive. Two of his plays “The War” and the lyrical drama “Two People Speak for the Peace of the World” were persecuted and banned, the first by the Metaxas dictatorship and the second by his political comrades.
He took part in the WWII war and the Resistance. After the coup of the colonels in 1967, he self-exiled himself in Switzerland, from where he traveled throughout Europe participating in radio broadcasts and poetry festivals, while he was honored by various European universities, and edited his autobiographical narrative Οδύνη / Anguish, which was published in 1969 in New York.He returned to Greece after the dictatorship ended.He received many awards and honors, and was nominated four times for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He died in 1991 in Ploumitsa.
His work comprises of poetry, but also, prose and translations, and is characterized by lyricism, intense dramatic writing and social reflection, love for nature, life and humans.
Concerning poetry, Vrettakos says:
“To this poetry, then, little by little and without realizing it, I gave my soul. And without being certain that I am a poet, I now know that I am nothing else. It would be enough for me if I were at least certain that through this poetry, I did my life duty…”.
The presentation on the back cover of the book The Naked Child says: “The Naked Child, despite its many autobiographical elements, is not a purely autobiographical work. Nikiforos Vrettakos, wanting to confess his reactions and emotions in a certain period of time – the era of childhood – within a certain environment, fictionally recreated all of his material. The two central heroes are the composite of many faces that represent good and evil in the years of his first acquaintance with the world. His ultimate goal was to convey the painful reality of the blows his sensitivity received.”
Excerpts from the book:
“At first the children gathered around us and looked at us strangely with their hands behind their backs. I, they then said, looked like this animal and our Margie looked like that. When we left they put us in the middle and followed us all the way to our house. [……..] Their hatred grew darker and one day they declared an all-out war on us. Holding hands, Margie and I were walking home alone from school. A group of children, who seemed to have fallen from the trees, tangled their hands in our hair and dragged us down. When they left, crying, I shook Margie’s uniform and walked behind her, looking around in fear.There was not a soul to be seen. The flock had already disappeared as if it had flown into the trees.” (1919 / p. 16)
“I’m not cold, I hurt, something else. A garment that is outside the clothes, or inside them. I can’t tell you. It’s not the clothes, it’s not the fire.” {p. 74}
“This damn old life is worth everything. To breathe and rejoice, forgetting that you have flesh and bones. You think you have the sea inside you, the sun, the whole world. What more do you want to live in this world without hating?” (p. 27).
Β. The article by Christina M. Akrivopoulou (PhD in Constitutional Law, lawyer and professor of law at the Hellenic University of Athens) to which I will refer today, concerns the right to the protection of personal data through the lens of the right to privacy.
Akrivopoulou explains that while the right to the protection of personal data may not be identical with the right to privacy, the value of its recognition is found in the value of protecting the individual’s privacy, which lies in its ability to provide the person with negative, defensive protection from any invasion or intervention in their private space, as well as from any kind of oppressive, manipulative, controlling or paternalistic behavior that may aim to limit the person’s freedom to develop their personality and autonomy, to shape, and to enjoy relationships and choices through which they define themselves.
In this context, Akrivopoulou claims, the protection of the right to privacy ensures each of us, like an invisible shield, the protection of our identity, our dignity, and our ability to adopt alternative forms of life, from any critical, manipulative or degrading behavior.It allows us to protect ourselves from behaviors that are driven by prejudices or that lead to conformity.Essentially, the value of privacy lies in the fact that it renders the individual “free, autonomous, self-empowered and independent in the constitution of his or her self”.She adds that under the cover / shelter of this negative-defensive protection, “privacy positively allows persons to freely shape and develop thier personality, sexuality, communication and expression, as well as the way in which they present themselves to others, and as a result allows a person to create a coherent, distinct identity based on a set of moral principles and values that they have autonomously chosen”.
The author explains that the value of privacy can be defined more clearly by examining the consequences of its loss. And this is where the role of personal data protection appears crucial, since the particular nature of personal data facilitates the loss of control of the person over his privacy, and this loss “leaves the person naked, vulnerable and puts at risk the core of thier autonomy, their identity.” She notes that “personal data” could be defined as the data that allow direct connection with its subject and that in theory and legislation are characterized as sensitive personal data, such as genetic, biometric and medical data, for instance.
Data concerning the health or hereditary diseases of the person, sexual orientation or ethnic origin, therefore, contain information about the person that is linked to their privacy, and “cover an inner sphere of the person in the sense of that particular space for shaping their autonomy and private choices, as a field of preparation for their externalization, expression and communication with the social and public space.”
The article also examines the possibilities that modern technology provides for the creation and circulation of “branded” information, what we call sensitive personal data, and how it enhances the possibility of such threats. Akrivopoulou tells us that if in the past simple conventional information could be disseminated quickly; modern technology and the use of the internet allow its circulation in zero time, beyond national borders and to millions of anonymous recipients. She writes: “Modern information can be collected, stored, compared, identified and processed through the use of modern information technology, a practice that is currently facilitated by the operation of more and more private, state and supranational ‘data banks’. Above all, modern technology allows the creation of ‘branded’ information, thus transcending the human and physical dimension of the human self, breaking down the privacy of the individual and ultimately the person into a mosaic of information, into what, very aptly in American theory, they call the digital man.
The protection of personal data is therefore important because the loss of privacy brings about a series of negative consequences, such as: the adoption by the individual of a more conformist [fearful] form of life and the limitation of their diversity, individuality, expression and creativity, all the way up to the loss of self-respect, social marginalization, isolation, stigmatization, financial loss, insecurity, exposure to discrimination (e.g. in the workplace, study or health contexts, public life, etc.), exploitation or manipulation. Essentially, the violation of this data constitutes a loss of control over the person’s data, which is equivalent to a loss of their autonomy.
You can read the entire article at: https://www.constitutionalism.gr/wpcontent/mgdata/pdf/412akribpoulou.pdf